Mobile Procurement and the International Supplier

Spend Matters welcomes another guest post from Ivy Montgomery of Vroozi. Back in January, Jason Busch challenged Vroozi to come up with fifty real-life use cases for mobile procurement. This is an ongoing series.

It’s not easy to take your company global. Experiencing success in your home market is a feat to be proud of, but international suppliers face a brand new set of challenges that they aren’t always prepared to handle.

It’s easy to understand why a company would want to go global. For organizations that have had sustained success in their native market, they’ve at least considered setting their sights on the next frontier. Companies need to be sure they are in the proper position to expand operations beyond their borders before taking the plunge into doing so.

Suppliers need to lock down brand new distribution methods. Their truck fleet, whether owned by themselves or an outside distribution company, may not be licensed for international delivery. If a company is able to expand operations overseas, they’ll even need to secure a means of shipping by air or sea.

In order to be successful in this business expansion, organizations need a way to develop new supply chains. Companies also need to ensure ways to properly interact with customers across different countries, cultures, languages, and time zones. Additionally, any business increasing operations needs to be ever more careful when managing inventory. Luckily for organizations nowadays, this process has been made a lot easier with mobile procurement.

One person who benefited from this is Hiroshi, an international supplier of small robotic creatures. When he was a young boy growing up in Nagano, Japan, Hiroshi was fascinated with harnessing the power of electricity, and began designing his own basic tests and experiments to learn all that he could. Before long, Hiroshi was building his own robotics from scratch.

Hiroshi loved working with electric circuits, motors, and robotics. The only thing that rivaled his passion for robotics was his love of dogs. Unfortunately, Hiroshi was bestowed with a horrible pet allergy. Not to worry, Hiroshi was a budding innovator.

Flash forward to his twenties, and Hiroshi has combined his interest into becoming the foremost supplier of mini social robots in the world. With his latest mini social pets, his company’s best-selling product line, people are able to buy a soft, fluffy, robotic dog or cat companion who can interact and even cuddle with them without leaving behind any traces of fur.

From a business perspective, Hiroshi is so efficient in his craft that he is able to price these pets at just US $199.00 retail and still turn a profit. To expand his market outside of Japan, Hiroshi lists his products in international marketplaces. These products have become extremely popular giveaways by companies for families of their employees and customers. So much so, that Hiroshi now creates custom social pets and robots branded with a company’s own name or slogan.

For companies, ordering these custom robotic pals is quick and easy, even on the go. All they need is a smartphone or tablet. Using their mobile procurement video chat feature to talk directly to Hiroshi, they can discuss their product customization needs so that they feel comfortable before placing the order. They can even converse with Hiroshi’s social robots via the video chat.

The video chat feature in this mobile procurement platform has allowed Hiroshi to supply the international market’s demands for his product, while still remaining the friendly face of his company and without having to fly all over the world. By bringing his customers face-to-face virtually with his pets and robots, Hiroshi’s customers are able to place orders by the hundreds and thousands with the same level of confidence with which Hiroshi builds his robotic buddies.